Abstract
“Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver aired a long-form piece on the FCC and net neutrality spanning roughly thirteen minutes and eighteen seconds on June 1, 2014. Oliver painted the current state of the Internet as not just practical, but functional, “The Internet in its current form is not broken and the FCC is currently taking steps to fix that.” Oliver included the FCC website link prominently so that viewers would note and use the url. Immediately following the episode, the FCC received so much web-related traffic and interest that their website crashed (Felder 2016). Oliver’s FCC piece demonstrated the show’s influence not only educating viewers in regards to the online debate, but invigorating their audience to become active in a cause. I conducted a close-read of two segments which “Last Week Tonight” aired on net neutrality, noting dialogue, news box images, incorporated news footage, and the positions addressed. I utilized a framing perspective on the information relayed in the programs in regards to net neutrality.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
"Net Neutrality", " Satire", " Public Sphere"
